Pardon the recent scantness

Pardon the recent scantness of postings. Other matters had been keeping me busy. But now we should be returning to more or less the regular frequency.

There's a good piece today in Slate by Jake Weisberg making what he calls "The Case Against the Case Against War." In fact, there's a nice package of pieces at Slate hashing out many of the different strands of the hawkish and dovish arguments.

I found a lot I agreed with in Jake's piece. But what really grabbed my attention today was a comment from -- of all people -- Colin Powell.

Recently I've criticized what seemed to me to be the casual attitude toward untruth many in this administration have when it comes to discussing Iraq. Generally, this comes from the more hawkish types from the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President and so forth.

Today the administration released new information showing purported ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaida. On balance, the information didn't seem that convincing. Or rather didn't seem to prove very much. There were overtures from al Qaida about whether Saddam would allow some members safe haven, but apparently no information about what the response had been. There are al Qaida in Iraq, but they're not in a part of Iraq that Saddam controls. Even different administration officials contradicted each other about what information the United States really had -- which doesn't inspire much confidence on a number of levels. The whole thing had the look of the old throwing whatever you can find up against the wall and seeing what sticks.

Again, what struck me though was a comment from Colin Powell.

Powell told a Senate Committee that while there was evidence of Iraqi-al Qaida cooperation there was still "no smoking gun" connecting Iraq to 9/11. I would hasten to note that there is also still no definitive proof that the author of Talking Points lives in a mansion in Georgetown or even that he owns that villa in Capri. But somehow stating this undeniable fact in such a fashion strikes me as a touch misleading.

Normally when you have a claim for which you have no evidence you characterize this as 'a claim for which you have no evidence.' Or one might even be bold and say 'it's not true, as far as we know.'

When you say there's no smoking gun, the obvious implication is that there is a lot of information, a lot of clues pointing in that direction, but no real slam-dunk evidence. But of course there simply isn't any evidence pointing to an Iraq-9/11 connection, and a lot of circumstantial evidence -- to the extent that one can ever prove a negative -- to the contrary.

So, as I asked several days back, why the endless attempts to fudge? Why the resistance to having this debate on the basis of the very serious facts and threats at hand? Though the rationale for liberating Kuwait was powerful in 1990 there was also testimony before Congress at the time about Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait which was later demonstrated to be entirely bogus. The immediate trigger for our involvement in Vietnam -- as opposed to the larger rationale for our involvement -- was later revealed to be based on exaggerations so great as to basically amount to lies. And one finds this sort of thing in the lead-ups to many other wars, in this country and in others. It's almost like these little bogus stories are the bon-bons of war, the little morsels and appetizers to chum up those who can't quite swallow the whole complicated rationale whole.